WALT’S VAULT 28

Just last week I’d been posting on the upscale urban merchandising initiative Warner Bros. is promoting in an effort to contemporize the Looney Tunes characters. Now this week Disney opens Vault 28, a new store in their Downtown Disney shopping district in Anaheim, which attempts to do essentially the same thing. The L.A. Times wrote a story about in yesterday’s Business section. According to the San Jose Mercury News:

The company also has been trying to reinvent Mickey Mouse and its other characters as trendy and urban. Vault 28, a reference to 1928, the year Mickey debuted in the cartoon “Steamboat Willie,” will sell fashions from celebrity-favored designers and carry lines called Kingdom Couture and DV28, whose clothing depicts classic characters including Tinkerbell, Alice in Wonderland and the Cheshire Cat.

Hey, I’m not against it. At least it’s better than YO YOGI and the “Gangsta Tweety” crap we had to put up with in previous attempts to “hippen” the classic characters. But why not just let the animation speak for itself. There is nothing hipper than that.